[quote="Jumble"Speaking as a Labour supporter my whole life, before we crack open the champagne, we need to figure out how to win. Happy to accept that may need to be led by Corbyn, but in case anyone missed it, we came second. No prize for second place.[/quote]

Until 10pm on Thursday, pretty much everyone thought the Tories were going to have a majority of anything from 50 to over 100. When the election was called a majority of 150 was even being suggested. So give people a few days to be happy that Labour have made some real progress from 2015. You want to figure out how to win? This election campaign just provided the blueprint!

"Excuse me Miss, do you like pineapple?"

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying"

That seems like a fatal flaw if so; It would make polling entirely pointless. You should be able to ask 'how likely are you to vote?' and predict turnout based on how many people answered yes in previous years.

Maybe a lot of people said they were not likely to vote and then changed their mind...

The BBC has spoken to former Tory voters in some of those lost seats to find out why they changed their minds.

David Manning, 64, has supported the Conservatives for most of his life. Living in the Plymouth Sutton and Devonport constituency, he was among the voters who helped Labour candidate Luke Pollard take the seat from Conservative Oliver Colvile - increasing Labour's share of the vote by 16.7%.

A retired teacher, he says the idea that he would have voted for Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party was laughable at the beginning of the campaign.

"I was even ridiculing him," he told the BBC. "At the start of the campaign I was totally against Jeremy Corbyn. My switch from blue to red was a surprise even to myself. However, as the campaign progressed I warmed to him and cooled to Mrs May."

David has voted for Labour only once before, when Tony Blair was leading the party.

"Mrs May was wooden and lacked charisma," he said. "And having witnessed first hand the way education has been dismantled by the Tories, I concluded that the alternative Labour was offering was far better for the country.

"I've watched my partner's school become an academy and have the money sucked out of it. I read every manifesto and asked myself an honest question: 'What do I think is best for the country?' I believe in Labour's manifesto."

David believes there has been a shift in public opinion and he thinks that is a trend which could continue.

Until 10pm on Thursday, pretty much everyone thought the Tories were going to have a majority of anything from 50 to over 100.

The yougov poll was basically the only one that had made substantial enough changes to their calculations and was the main one I was following so I was expecting a reduced majority as of two weeks or more ago and a hung parliament for all of the last week (I was also looking at the momentum within the poll and extrapolating forward which is dangerous but, eh, it seemed to work).

I think previously they'd guessed turnout by just asking people how likely they were to vote; this time they (yougov's revised model) asked a bunch of other demographic questions instead and used previous data to work out the actual probability of voting from there (or at least, a better probability than the self-reported one).

Meanwhile, the polling company which accurately predicted Friday’s dramatic election results released another poll – putting Labour five points ahead.

The Survation survey, for The Mail on Sunday, also found that 49 per cent of the public want the Prime Minister to resign, while only 38 per cent want her to remain in post.

Incredible.

May definitely looks toast, but can the Tories limp on without being forced to call a new election? I feel that Boris has the charisma to pretend to shift the Tories to the left to win a general election, but I'm not sure Rudd does.

Until 10pm on Thursday, pretty much everyone thought the Tories were going to have a majority of anything from 50 to over 100.

The yougov poll was basically the only one that had made substantial enough changes to their calculations and was the main one I was following so I was expecting a reduced majority as of two weeks or more ago and a hung parliament for all of the last week (I was also looking at the momentum within the poll and extrapolating forward which is dangerous but, eh, it seemed to work).

I think previously they'd guessed turnout by just asking people how likely they were to vote; this time they (yougov's revised model) asked a bunch of other demographic questions instead and used previous data to work out the actual probability of voting from there (or at least, a better probability than the self-reported one).

Torture data enough and it will confess to anything.A lot of "raw data" from the pollsters actually indicated a very close election (Conservative and Labour vote shares being similar, at most a 4-5 point Tory lead). But then they do their "adjustments", over fit the data, and report a headline that gives the Conservatives an 8 or even 12 point lead.

ICM polling report - the guys that gave a 12 point lead to the Tories wrote:

Table 3QB. The Conservatives, Labour, the Liberal Democrats, UKIP and other parties will fight the General Election in your area on June 8th.Which party will you vote for in the General Election on Thursday?Base: All respondents

Unweighted: Con: 525 Lab: 505

Weighted: Con: 551 Lab: 476

They allocated 2015 votes to some of those who indicated "unlikely to vote" (eh...), but then also added "refuse to vote" according to the same proportions (stop outguessing your respondents), and then artificially boosted the Conservative gain from that mechanism by 20% (wait, what!?).

elasto wrote:May definitely looks toast, but can the Tories limp on without being forced to call a new election? I feel that Boris has the charisma to pretend to shift the Tories to the left to win a general election, but I'm not sure Rudd does.

I don't think there's actually anything stopping them. Short of a leadership challenge, it's hard to imagine the remaining parties grouping up sufficiently well to topple May.Conservative rebels will be a problem and associations with the DUP may concern the more moderate members.

There's a lot of emphasis on "the youth vote" on TV - I would personally be shocked if the turnout rate for the 18-25 group was above 50%.That'd it be overwhelmingly pro-Labour would not surprise me, given the staggering amount of anti-Tory rhetoric my Facebook feed was filled with the past few weeks, and the collapse of Lib-Dem support in 2015.

Nate Silver had an article a few days ago about the issues with British polling. The main gist was about multiple layers of overcorrection and still trying to account for prior elections.

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking.

Xenomortis wrote:Torture data enough and it will confess to anything.A lot of "raw data" from the pollsters actually indicated a very close election (Conservative and Labour vote shares being similar, at most a 4-5 point Tory lead). But then they do their "adjustments", over fit the data, and report a headline that gives the Conservatives an 8 or even 12 point lead.

The problem is they have to do adjustments because people routinely lie to pollsters as a form of virtue signalling.

Traditionally more people vote Tory than say they will because the Tories are seen as 'the nasty party' even by many of their supporters, so voting Tory is something of 'a secret shame'.

It's possible that, this time around, voting Tory and voting for Corbyn were in some way equally 'shameful', so the raw data fitted the actual votes rather better than expected.

It's a tricky art to be sure, but, still, I'm surprised so many of them got it so badly wrong.

It is true that the Conservatives have beaten the polls more often than Labour (by about 2:1?), but I suspect the "shy Tory" effect is overstated.I would have to look back at the various polls before previous elections to really argue further though, and I am no statistician.

Given that apparently Jeremy *unt is still Health Secretary and both the BBC and Sky have mispronounced his name, I thought I'd take the moment to share this for our non-British friends who didn't get it

Crabtree's bludgeon: “no set of mutually inconsistent observations can exist for which some human intellect cannot conceive a coherent explanation, however complicated”

Xenomortis wrote:Torture data enough and it will confess to anything.A lot of "raw data" from the pollsters actually indicated a very close election (Conservative and Labour vote shares being similar, at most a 4-5 point Tory lead). But then they do their "adjustments", over fit the data, and report a headline that gives the Conservatives an 8 or even 12 point lead.

The problem is they have to do adjustments because people routinely lie to pollsters as a form of virtue signalling.

Traditionally more people vote Tory than say they will because the Tories are seen as 'the nasty party' even by many of their supporters, so voting Tory is something of 'a secret shame'.

It's possible that, this time around, voting Tory and voting for Corbyn were in some way equally 'shameful', so the raw data fitted the actual votes rather better than expected.

It's a tricky art to be sure, but, still, I'm surprised so many of them got it so badly wrong.

As far as I know polls are generally also off quite a bit because the group of people that fills them in tends to be unrepresentative of the overall voting population. It is surprisingly hard to get a very representative sample size to poll from. In the Netherlands you often see an opposite effect. The Party for Freedom, which is basically the Dutch anti-muslim, anti-immigration, anti-EU party, tends to be over-represented in the polls, in some more than others. Some polled them at 25 seats for our last election and they ended up with 20. It's difficult to explain why, some say that a large portion of the people thinking favourably about them simply doesn't show up to vote, others say that people say they want to vote Party for Freedom to the polls to give a signal to the government that they're dissatisfied, although when it comes down to vote they don't actually believe that the Party for Freedom is actually a viable alternative. There are some other biases for the polls, and over the courses of several elections the people making those polls tend to adjust their results from past experience. It's always off a bit because the bias tends to change significantly from election to election and the adjustment is only made based on how 'off' they were in previous elections.

They weren't actually that far off in many cases, polling firms just beat the data to death trying to get the result they wanted. The miss (4% on average) was totally in-line with the past 70 years of election data.

There's a certain amount of freedom involved in cycling: you're self-propelled and decide exactly where to go. If you see something that catches your eye to the left, you can veer off there, which isn't so easy in a car, and you can't cover as much ground walking.

No it isn't, I just made it up. I suspect a larger number of Brits are vegetarian (not necessarily vegan) than the French for instance, and that animal rights are more serious as well. But I don't think this is a well set stereotype.

Jumble wrote:Speaking as a Labour supporter my whole life, before we crack open the champagne, we need to figure out how to win. Happy to accept that may need to be led by Corbyn, but in case anyone missed it, we came second. No prize for second place.

Until 10pm on Thursday, pretty much everyone thought the Tories were going to have a majority of anything from 50 to over 100. When the election was called a majority of 150 was even being suggested. So give people a few days to be happy that Labour have made some real progress from 2015. You want to figure out how to win? This election campaign just provided the blueprint!

That's... optimistic. Labour were up against the worst Tory manifesto anyone has ever seen, against a Tory leader with zero charisma. Under normal circumstances, they would have absolutely crushed it. That they not only failed to crush it, but failed to get even close to first place, I see as a somewhat damning indictment of Corbyn's policies. The only reason they did better than expected is because the Tory manifesto was an unexpected act of hubris, and people love punishing hubris.

Jumble wrote:Speaking as a Labour supporter my whole life, before we crack open the champagne, we need to figure out how to win. Happy to accept that may need to be led by Corbyn, but in case anyone missed it, we came second. No prize for second place.

Until 10pm on Thursday, pretty much everyone thought the Tories were going to have a majority of anything from 50 to over 100. When the election was called a majority of 150 was even being suggested. So give people a few days to be happy that Labour have made some real progress from 2015. You want to figure out how to win? This election campaign just provided the blueprint!

That's... optimistic. Labour were up against the worst Tory manifesto anyone has ever seen, against a Tory leader with zero charisma. Under normal circumstances, they would have absolutely crushed it. That they not only failed to crush it, but failed to get even close to first place, I see as a somewhat damning indictment of Corbyn's policies. The only reason they did better than expected is because the Tory manifesto was an unexpected act of hubris, and people love punishing hubris.

You do realise this election was only called because the Tories expected to win a big majority, right? Until 9:59pm on Thursday evening, nearly everyone expected that outcome. To say 'actually it was still bad for Labour' is ludicrous. They boosted their vote share by 10%. They're now in a position when they could actually win next time, and that next time might be sooner rather than later. I mean, nowhere near first place? There's almost 30 seats where the Tory majority is down to under 2,000 now:

BoJo and Moggy. Two names off the top of my head who have a modicum of charisma.

The Tories expected a big majority at the start. That was because they had yet to reveal their utterly cancerous manifesto. If they had just shut up and stuck to platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit", and kept their manifesto relatively anodyne, they would certainly have increased their majority at Labour's expense. Then May released her manifesto, and the Tory lead dwindled to almost nothing. That was what did it. It wasn't a sudden upswell of support for socialism, it was people punishing May for that abortion of a manifesto.

You keep saying that a big Tory majority was expected right up until the exit polls came out, but that's not true at all. There was a YouGov poll the previous week showing the Tories ending up with 310 seats, and most of the people I talked to and listened to seemed to think that was a fairly good prediction.

SlyReaper wrote:The Tories expected a big majority at the start. That was because they had yet to reveal their utterly cancerous manifesto. If they had just shut up and stuck to platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit", and kept their manifesto relatively anodyne, they would certainly have increased their majority at Labour's expense. Then May released her manifesto, and the Tory lead dwindled to almost nothing. That was what did it. It wasn't a sudden upswell of support for socialism, it was people punishing May for that abortion of a manifesto.

I don't think that's fair either. The voting turnout was the highest in 25 years. If Corbyn's socialism was unpopular and May's 'cancerous manifesto' was too, you'd expect the exact opposite.

Comparing with 2015, for example, Cameron got 11.3m and Miliband got 9.3m - whereas this year May got 13.7m and Corbyn got 12.9m

That hardly suggests May's manifesto was viewed as 'cancerous' - and with Corbyn getting a third more votes than Miliband it's hard to paint it as anything but an upswell of support for 'socialism*'

*Socialism meaning no more tax rises on the poor and middle classes, and more investment in schools, hospitals and the police - horror of horrors...! Even the IMF recently admitted that austerity is self-defeating when trying to reduce a deficit - instead you need government investment to grow your way out of it...

SlyReaper wrote:BoJo and Moggy. Two names off the top of my head who have a modicum of charisma.

The Tories expected a big majority at the start. That was because they had yet to reveal their utterly cancerous manifesto. If they had just shut up and stuck to platitudes like "Brexit means Brexit", and kept their manifesto relatively anodyne, they would certainly have increased their majority at Labour's expense. Then May released her manifesto, and the Tory lead dwindled to almost nothing. That was what did it. It wasn't a sudden upswell of support for socialism, it was people punishing May for that abortion of a manifesto.

You keep saying that a big Tory majority was expected right up until the exit polls came out, but that's not true at all. There was a YouGov poll the previous week showing the Tories ending up with 310 seats, and most of the people I talked to and listened to seemed to think that was a fairly good prediction.

Boris Johnson? Jacob Rees-Mogg? Things really are bad for the Tories if those are their best options. Does anyone outside of Westminster even know who Rees-Mogg is?

And that YouGov poll was very much the exception. The general consensus in the media and among the other polls (the Survation one apart) was a Tory majority of at least 40 and possible as high as 100. Even YouGov didn't quite trust their experimental poll, they put out a different one giving the Tories a 7 point lead as well.

"Excuse me Miss, do you like pineapple?"

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it through not dying"

Well, I know who Rees-Mogg is, and I live in Bristol. So... yes? By the same token, who had heard of Corbyn before he entered the Labour leadership contest?

I don't accept that high turnout means the manifestos were popular, at least not in this case. I think you're underestimating just how terrible the Tory one was. Attacking the elderly through the dementia tax, censoring the internet, attacking human rights. I don't know anyone who was in favour of these things. Fox hunting! A cause the common man can really get behind! People didn't vote for those policies, they voted Tory because they thought Corbyn would fuck up the Brexit negotiations, which is kind of a big deal at the moment. Labour's manifesto, I think was polarising. People either thought it was the best thing ever, or that it was going to be an economic disaster. In particular, it was the young voters they managed to get on their side. It wasn't enough, because there are still a lot of older people who lived through the 70s and don't want to repeat it.